Asymptomatic

There must be intelligent life down here

Travel Prep
September 05, 2009

Here comes the busiest conference time of the year - September. Apart from school starting, which probably merits its own posting (assuming I can ever get back into the swing of regular writing on this blog), there are any number of conferences to attend this month and next.

This month, I’ve got plane tickets to hit Columbus, Ohio for the Habari Party – an event whose name I’m not fond of, but is good enough for the purposes of celebrating the third year of Habari development. It sure does not seem like it’s been that long. While I’m there, I’ll also be popping by the Columbus PHP Meetup chapter with skippy to pitch Habari in some fashion.

Marginally Insane, Talking to Myself
August 06, 2009

This is likely to be a somewhat odd post from the usual, but better that than nothing. I really need to stop starting my posts with these inane prefaces – you’d certainly get the idea that the post was odd just by reading it, without me having to tell you.

I’ve been thinking about this a bit more frequently lately: I can’t be the only person who has this running internal monologue. Actually, I know I’m not. Other people write about theirs. While I’m not certain I’m different, I have noticed on occasion that some people’s monologues stop. They stop frequently.

Zucchini Yield
August 03, 2009

We’ve had a reasonable year with the garden so far. The tomatoes seem to be eeking by. Every so often, one of them will just go bad. There seem to be enough that are good to bother keeping them. We keep spraying and hoping for the best. But the zucchini is outrageous.

I guess maybe you’re not supposed to let them grow this big? These things are easily at least the size of my calf. I suppose we could have picked them earlier, but then what would we do with it? It’s a paradox. You pick them small, then you get them too frequently to do anything with them. You leave them on the plant and pick them when you’re ready, you end up with giant zucchinis that you can’t do anything practical with.

Biking Insanity
July 26, 2009

I’m not sure why I have not blogged about this. Perhaps because I’ve been too busy doing it instead.

A month or two ago, Nate posted a link to this adventure race site and suggested that we enter a company team. Everyone was excruciatingly naive, or maybe drunk, and decided to sign on. Well, nobody has pulled out yet, so it seems we’re still on. And everyone is doing a bit to prepare.

Watch Computing
July 11, 2009

I’ve been casting about online for some kind of portable training device, something that can keep track of my time on the road while I train for a particular race later this year. There are quite a few options for watches, each with options of their own.

One of the more fascinating watch brands out there is Suunto. There are a couple of other makes that have similar capabilities, but Suunto looks to have expanded on an interesting idea of connecting wirelessly to peripherals like a chest-worn heart-rate monitor, a bike cadence monitor, and even a GPS. The watch acts as a central processor for the peripherals, receiving, recording, and presenting a subset of the information, and then relaying it (via USB tether) to a computer for more intense processing and output.